Pharmacy Jobs: Northern Nevada Medical Center

Written by Anna Henningsgaard

The whole world is facing a severe and problematic shortage of qualified laboratory and medical personnel. Third world countries are suffering because their doctors and medical staff are immigrating to meet excess demand for high-paid medical positions in Europe. It is more difficult for medical professionals to come to America, however, and United States is facing same challenges of a shrinking medical community. According to American Society for Clinical Pathology, over half of all US laboratories report difficulties hiring new medical testing personnel.

The US Department of Labor projects that country will need 13,200 medical laboratory professionals through year 2010. This number cannot be filled by fewer than 5,000 people who graduate from training programs each year. At same time average age of medical workforce is rising steadily. Younger, newly trained medical workers have not entered quickly enough to keep pace with retirements.

These problems could be attributed partially to fact that training facilities for these medical professionals have been closing and declining in number. School closings in last five years have reduced number of training programs by 30%. This decline in training programs affects small rural areas as well as big cities. Los Angeles and Miami have no accredited clinical training programs for medical technologists or medical laboratory technicians. The shortage is growing so bad that senators are looking at legislation to defray costs of training for medical personnel. GA

Medical Error Crisis

Written by Anna Henningsgaard

The unfortunate truth about medical errors is that they plague poor and uninsured, reflecting great medical inequality in our country. For those who do not consider medical errors to be a problem, consider this: medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans every year. This reflects fact that medical errors kill more people per year than breast cancer, AIDS, or motor vehicle accidents. Doctors complain of inflated medical malpractice insurace costs, but medication-related errors for hospitalized patients cost around $2 billion annually.

The 41 million uninsured Americans exhibit consistently worse clinical outcomes than insured patients with same maladies and are at increased risk for dying prematurely. Only 55% of patients in a recent random sample of adults received recommended care in treatments and preventative treatments, and lag between discovery of a new medicine and its adoption by doctors is 17 years. You could suffer from an ailment and not receive proper treatment simply because your doctor is not well educated about treatments that were invented almost two decades ago!

The problem is not restricted to administering too little medication. Every year millions of people are unnecessarily hospitalized. Using excessive, unnecessary antibiotics to kill infections outright is a widespread practice that, while curing individual patients, cause strains of a disease to mutate and grow stronger, resulting in more serious infections for entire population. In 1993, excessive antibiotics were prescribed in 20 million cases, and by now that number has multiplied.